Monthly Archive: April 2018

This week’s Carnival of Space is hosted by Brian Wang at his Next Big Future blog. Click here to read Carnival of Space #559 And if you’re interested in looking back, here’s an archive to all the past Carnivals of Space . If you’ve got a space-related blog, you should really join the carnival.

Welcome back to Messier Monday! Today, we continue in our tribute to our dear friend, Tammy Plotner, by looking at the globular cluster known as Messier 68. In the 18th century, while searching the night sky for comets, French astronomer Charles Messier kept noting the presence of fixed, diffuse objects he initially mistook for comets.

Looking deep into the observable Universe – and hence, back to the earliest periods of time – is an immensely fascinating thing. In so doing, astronomers are able to see the earliest galaxies in the Universe and learn more about how they evolved over time. From this, they are not only able to see how large-scale structures (like galaxies and galaxy clusters) formed, but also the role played by dark matter.

A recent capture of Jupiter from April 21st. Image credit and copyright: Efrain Morales Rivera . It’s a question I’ve fielded lots this weekend leading up to last night’s April Pink Full Moon, and one I expect we’ll get again tonight: “What’s that bright star near the Moon?” That bright “star” is actually a planet, the king of them all as far as our Solar System is concerned: Jupiter

With the recent launch of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) – which took place on Wednesday, April 18th, 2018 – a lot of attention has been focused on the next-generation space telescopes that will be taking to space in the coming years. These include not only the James Webb Space Telescope , which is currently scheduled for launch in 2020, but some other advanced spacecraft that will be deployed by the 2030s.

On December 19th, 2013 , the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia spacecraft took to space with one of the most ambitious missions ever. Over the course of its planned 5-year mission (which was recently extended), this space observatory would map over a billion stars, planets, comets, asteroids and quasars in order to create the largest and most precise 3D catalog of the Milky Way ever created. The first release of Gaia data , which took place in September 2016, contained the distances and motions of over two million stars.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), NASA’s latest exoplanet-hunting space telescope, was launched into space on Wednesday, April 18th, 2018 . As the name suggests, this telescope will use the Transit Method to detect terrestrial-mass planets (i.e.

The European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission was an ambitious one. As the first-ever space probe to rendezvous with and then orbit a comet, Rosetta and its lander (Philae) revealed a great deal about the comet 67p/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. In addition to the learning things about the comet’s shape, composition and tail, the mission also captured some incredible images of the comet’s surface before it ended.

A lot of attention has been dedicated to the machine learning technique known as “deep learning”, where computers are capable of discerning patterns in data without being specifically programmed to do so. In recent years, this technique has been applied to a number of applications, which include voice and facial recognition for social media platforms like Facebook. However, astronomers are also benefiting from deep learning, which is helping them to analyze images of galaxies and understand how they form and evolve.

In the past few decades, there has been an explosion in the number of extra-solar planets that have been discovered. As of April 1st, 2018 , a total of 3,758 exo planets have been confirmed in 2,808 systems, with 627 systems having more than one planet

Welcome to the 558th Carnival of Space! The Carnival is a community of space science and astronomy writers and bloggers, who submit their best work each week for your benefit. We have a fantastic roundup today, so now, on to this week’s stories! First up, over at Blasting News , we learn that as the Google Lunar XPrize ends Israel is still shooting for the moon! Israel’s SpaceIL is still planning to land on the Moon by the end of 2018! Best of luck! Then, we visit The Hill , where we learn why Why NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is such a fiscal black hole.

The hunt for planets beyond our Solar System has led to the discovery of thousands of candidates in the past few decades. Most of these have been gas giants that range in size from being Super-Jupiters to Neptune-sized planets

Earth’s magnetic field is one of the most mysterious features of our planet. It is also essential to life as we know it, ensuring that our atmosphere is not stripped away by solar wind and shielding life on Earth from harmful radiation. For some time, scientists have theorized that it is the result of a dynamo action in our core, where the liquid outer core revolves around the solid inner core and in the opposite direction of the Earth’s rotation.

What if our Solar System had another generation of planets that formed before, or alongside, the planets we have today? A new study published in Nature Communications on April 17th 2018 presents evidence that says that’s what happened.

When Elon Musk of SpaceX tweets something interesting, it generates a wave of excitement. So when he tweeted recently that SpaceX might be working on a way to retrieve upper stages of their rockets, it set off a chain of intrigued responses. SpaceX will try to bring rocket upper stage back from orbital velocity using a giant party balloon — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 15, 2018 SpaceX has been retrieving and reusing their lower stages for some time now, and it’s lowered the cost of launching payloads into space